Please Bring the Silent Service to America!

Everybody’s all excited, or at least that’s what ABC is hyping up, about the new show Last Resort. A nuclear submarine becoming a sovereign nation isn’t exactly an original idea, since there were probably movies and novels about the subject that predate the show by a couple of decades. The best example is clearly the geopolitical thriller, the Silent Service, by Kaiji Kawaguchi.

The basic plot is that a nuclear submarine is made ready for deployment after the hard work of a joint cooperative between the United States military and Japan’s Self-Defense Force. During its first mission, the captain of the vessel does the ballsy thing and declares the submarine loaded with many warheads, a sovereign nation called Yamato. The whole series sort of becomes your basic political thriller where each country in the world seeks to take down the Captain and his nation for their bravado. But rather become something like a mere Tom Clancy throwaway novel, the Silent Service tackles the topic of geopolitics head-on. I could write more about this series, but nobody has bothered to localize this story into English.

That’s all I want, for this intriguing series to come out already. We already have Eagle, the Making of an Asian-American Presiden, why not this?